Don’t forget the inertia involved to allow Gaia’s systems to respond to current data points. Estimates I have seen are that any changes we make today will not have effect before the next 40 years are out. That period of inertia waiting for Gaia system change is only an estimate at best.
There are fast and slow effects and feedbacks. Atmospheric methane is one of the fastest. We are already triggering such things as carbon sink collapses and reversals. Major sea level rise is already baked in. We need to stop the fast impacts by reducing emissions AND use SRM to bring down temperatures to limit the kick off of longer term impacts that are starting to accelerate. Sadly, cleaning up air pollution is the worst thing to do in the absence of SRM as we are seeing.
In other words, what you're saying is actually WORSE for climate change. We're just going to keep drilling and drilling and using oil/coal/gas (fossil fuels in general) until we totally destroy this earth. Would it actually be better that there is actually a peak in FF production followed by a steady decline which would force us to properly think of alternative energy sources? Without being forced to, we're just going to keep Business As Usual, right?
What are your thoughts on the energy transition to renewables? Is that just basically more hopium and can't possibly be done on the scale required quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change?
From what we see with the latest 5 year plan plus current policies, the Chinese Party State is going all in on ecomodernism that it can without threatening stability. That includes very major moves to the recycling of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. Some examples:
The transition is also affecting heavy goods vehicles and other industrial equipment, such as tractors, excavators and mining equipment. The level of Chinese oil imports will tell us how quickly the transport transition is happening. Coal use the rate of electricity decarbonization. There has been the breakthrough in steel production that removes the need for cooking coal, but that will take a decade plus at least to play out. The other area is cement production.
China is continuing to collapse the price of the transition, creating the “over capacity” needed to destroy the fossil fuel dependent industries. As for “peak materials” such as copper, lithium etc. there is the mixture of recycling, materials science that reduces dependence (we have already seen this hugely with cobalt etc.) and efficiency. For example, higher voltages in EVs reduce the need for copper, and aluminum can be used instead of copper where possible. Sodium ion batteries will also remove much of the dependency on lithium. And there is no shortage of sodium sources.
Can China move fast enough to provide humanity with a chance? That’s the question. Europe will take advantage of the lower cost transition, at some point even the US will be forced to. We are already too late, that’s why SRM will be needed. Of course, climate change is just one of the issues of the overuse of the Earth that we have to address.
If China can “win without fighting” all the better as resources can be focused on the transition.
From the very beginning of 'Peak Oil', it was clear that the idea was rubbish. From way back in the 70s, the critical 'peak oil' date kept getting shoved forward, as ever more sources were uncovered. However, the seperate but connected issue of the use of oil in everything from plastics to jet fighters is intimately connected to the nature of capitalist production. I suppose 'peak oil' can be viewed as a clever diversion from addressing the contradictions of capitalism's reliance on oil as a source of profit and of course, Western, military power.
Roger, I started to study Peak Oil around the same time (late 00s) and have been grappling with the concept ever since. Like many others outside it, I have been surprised by the resilience of the oil extraction industry. A red flag I see is that the “success stories” that you mention are very limited (3), so seem fragile and not easily replicable (AFAIK, the only other fracking success ever in the world is the Vaca Muerta in Argentina).
But as an engineer with experience in supply chain stuff, I have a lot of doubts about the possibilities of industrial electrification at scale. Maybe China can pull it off, with a mix of renewables and nuclear, and tight material recycling loops but I don’t see enough high quality resources (copper specifically and industrial metals in general as well as low cost energy to extract them) in the world to electrify everyone and everywhere in the planet.
Regarding climate change / global boiling, after much study of the topic I have come to believe that there are not enough hard facts sustaining the thesis that we are now in a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming phase. Much of what present day climatologists pass as proven facts are actually only computer models (where GIGO applies in full force) AND the info they use come from very short time series, usually of the last 100-150 years. To be short on this huge topic, what the “model climatologists” promoting the CAGW present is in very stark opposition with the body of knowledge that paleoclimatologists have gathered. And also, we still don’t know precisely how the heat flows inside the atmosphere and oceans and outbound from planet really work and what regulation mechanisms and feedbacks exist, so any attempt to build a climate model using mostly the air column physics is going to fail. Always.
To be more precise: I do not deny that many regions of the world have been getting warmer over the last decades. It’s that we don’t know what % of the rise is due to natural cycles vs anthropogenic activity. And that future looking models fail consistently.
If the future of humanity is at stake, material scientists and engineers will figure out a way to replace copper with aluminum for many purposes. And there's essentially infinite supply of aluminum available.
I share your skepticism about worst case climate scenarios. Dinosaurs survived back when there was zero Antarctic ice sheet and most of the world was covered by jungles. It won't be easy to transition from our current climate to the climate of the dinosaur era, but if there is no alternative, there will be enormous pressure to find some solution. Possibly a solution that reduces human population by 90%, say to under a billion (mostly living on the high plateaus of Tibet, Wyoming, the Andes, etc), and possibly reduces population abruptly. But 1 billion is still plenty enough to keep human civilization going.
The Earth will be just fine, it will be a blip in its long history. Humanity may also very well survive. It’s modern human civilization anywhere near the current scale that will be lost. Collapse will be happen in stages with periods of relative calm, one lower level of complexity at a time, a dragged out affair. Everything possible to stem the tide will be tried, except for anything that challenges the powerful until it is too late. That’s how societies tend to collapse. From one simpler short term equilibrium to another. Some will do better than others.
Unless we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere plus probably large scale SRM given the change that is baked in given the slower equilibrium moves.
Who knows what a warmer climate could bring? A couple meters of sea level rise could wipe out a lot of critical infrastructure, indeed.
OTOH, the geologic & paleoclimatology record shows that the ecosystems of warmer Earth periods were WAY more productive than today’s. It could be the case that a warmer Earth could see a green Sahara & Arabian peninsula and longer growing seasons in higher latitudes. My point here is that nobody hasn’t even the slightest clue about what will happen.
You are most likely right about your population figures. The problem is will the 8 billion people who will die sacrifice themselves for the surviving one billion? Or will they go out fighting? Are you and yours willing to be part of the 8 billion? Will the fight for survival result in way less than 1 billion survivors? What will "survival" look like? I don't think survival in a post global climate change crash scenario will be like a picnic in the park with a happy, Disney ending for all that resembles anything resembling what we call "civilization".
I continue to be amazed at the ability of one side of the political spectrum to be utterly blinded to mainstream science (climate science) and the other side to also be utterly blinded to mainstream science (fundamental human sex differences). Both displaying the same post-modernist selective brain damage. Facts don’t care about your ideology or your feelings. I am a historical materialist, if facts conflict with my beliefs I rethink my beliefs. You should try it sometime.
Your observation on Canadian Tar Sands rising from 1.6 mbpd in 2010 to 3.5 mbpd in 2025 is crucial. Companies like Suncor Energy embody the exact dynamic you describe - each time the market thinks peak oil is near, technology innovation pushes it further out. What's remarkable about oil sands is the sheer scale of proven reserves (170+ billion barrels in Athabasca alone) combined with progresively lower extraction costs through SAGD improvements and mining efficiency. Suncor's integrated model - mining, in situ, upgrading, refining - means they've essentially built permanent energy infrastructure with 40+ year production visibility. Your point about being 'too smart for our own good' resonates here: oil sands technology solved the wrong problem brilliantly. We extended fossil fuel availability just as climate science showed we needed to stop, not continue. The irony is that Suncor's operational excellence accelerates the very climate crisis you describe.
Peak OIl is a confusing subject to me, and guess I'm not alone.
As I have heard/read it seems that PO for 'conventional' crue oil was in Nov 2018, with shale oil and gas filling the gap just to keep our energy intensive world going.
Shale oil, with a little help from the Tar Sands, has bridged us to the Chinese driven energy transition. So the peak will be in oil consumption rather than oil production.
While I have not read the latest IEA (not DEA as I now have edited to be correct) report, but only heard it referenced and analyzed, I understand that they focus on the peak and fall of oil production.
Don’t forget the inertia involved to allow Gaia’s systems to respond to current data points. Estimates I have seen are that any changes we make today will not have effect before the next 40 years are out. That period of inertia waiting for Gaia system change is only an estimate at best.
There are fast and slow effects and feedbacks. Atmospheric methane is one of the fastest. We are already triggering such things as carbon sink collapses and reversals. Major sea level rise is already baked in. We need to stop the fast impacts by reducing emissions AND use SRM to bring down temperatures to limit the kick off of longer term impacts that are starting to accelerate. Sadly, cleaning up air pollution is the worst thing to do in the absence of SRM as we are seeing.
Yes I think you are right, in my lifetime I too have watched Peak Oil keep drifting into the future rather like nuclear fusion.
"I am old enough to be swanning off this Earth after a good life..."
Me too. I think we have had the best of times, Roger.
In other words, what you're saying is actually WORSE for climate change. We're just going to keep drilling and drilling and using oil/coal/gas (fossil fuels in general) until we totally destroy this earth. Would it actually be better that there is actually a peak in FF production followed by a steady decline which would force us to properly think of alternative energy sources? Without being forced to, we're just going to keep Business As Usual, right?
What are your thoughts on the energy transition to renewables? Is that just basically more hopium and can't possibly be done on the scale required quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change?
I really appreciate your insights, thank you.
From what we see with the latest 5 year plan plus current policies, the Chinese Party State is going all in on ecomodernism that it can without threatening stability. That includes very major moves to the recycling of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. Some examples:
https://insideevs.com/news/776315/china-battery-recycling-solved-claims/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X24005798
https://recyclinginternational.com/business/business-news/swancor-powers-chinas-first-fully-recyclable-wind-turbine/61570/
The transition is also affecting heavy goods vehicles and other industrial equipment, such as tractors, excavators and mining equipment. The level of Chinese oil imports will tell us how quickly the transport transition is happening. Coal use the rate of electricity decarbonization. There has been the breakthrough in steel production that removes the need for cooking coal, but that will take a decade plus at least to play out. The other area is cement production.
China is continuing to collapse the price of the transition, creating the “over capacity” needed to destroy the fossil fuel dependent industries. As for “peak materials” such as copper, lithium etc. there is the mixture of recycling, materials science that reduces dependence (we have already seen this hugely with cobalt etc.) and efficiency. For example, higher voltages in EVs reduce the need for copper, and aluminum can be used instead of copper where possible. Sodium ion batteries will also remove much of the dependency on lithium. And there is no shortage of sodium sources.
Can China move fast enough to provide humanity with a chance? That’s the question. Europe will take advantage of the lower cost transition, at some point even the US will be forced to. We are already too late, that’s why SRM will be needed. Of course, climate change is just one of the issues of the overuse of the Earth that we have to address.
If China can “win without fighting” all the better as resources can be focused on the transition.
Thank you for the detailed response.
From the very beginning of 'Peak Oil', it was clear that the idea was rubbish. From way back in the 70s, the critical 'peak oil' date kept getting shoved forward, as ever more sources were uncovered. However, the seperate but connected issue of the use of oil in everything from plastics to jet fighters is intimately connected to the nature of capitalist production. I suppose 'peak oil' can be viewed as a clever diversion from addressing the contradictions of capitalism's reliance on oil as a source of profit and of course, Western, military power.
Roger, I started to study Peak Oil around the same time (late 00s) and have been grappling with the concept ever since. Like many others outside it, I have been surprised by the resilience of the oil extraction industry. A red flag I see is that the “success stories” that you mention are very limited (3), so seem fragile and not easily replicable (AFAIK, the only other fracking success ever in the world is the Vaca Muerta in Argentina).
But as an engineer with experience in supply chain stuff, I have a lot of doubts about the possibilities of industrial electrification at scale. Maybe China can pull it off, with a mix of renewables and nuclear, and tight material recycling loops but I don’t see enough high quality resources (copper specifically and industrial metals in general as well as low cost energy to extract them) in the world to electrify everyone and everywhere in the planet.
Regarding climate change / global boiling, after much study of the topic I have come to believe that there are not enough hard facts sustaining the thesis that we are now in a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming phase. Much of what present day climatologists pass as proven facts are actually only computer models (where GIGO applies in full force) AND the info they use come from very short time series, usually of the last 100-150 years. To be short on this huge topic, what the “model climatologists” promoting the CAGW present is in very stark opposition with the body of knowledge that paleoclimatologists have gathered. And also, we still don’t know precisely how the heat flows inside the atmosphere and oceans and outbound from planet really work and what regulation mechanisms and feedbacks exist, so any attempt to build a climate model using mostly the air column physics is going to fail. Always.
To be more precise: I do not deny that many regions of the world have been getting warmer over the last decades. It’s that we don’t know what % of the rise is due to natural cycles vs anthropogenic activity. And that future looking models fail consistently.
If the future of humanity is at stake, material scientists and engineers will figure out a way to replace copper with aluminum for many purposes. And there's essentially infinite supply of aluminum available.
I share your skepticism about worst case climate scenarios. Dinosaurs survived back when there was zero Antarctic ice sheet and most of the world was covered by jungles. It won't be easy to transition from our current climate to the climate of the dinosaur era, but if there is no alternative, there will be enormous pressure to find some solution. Possibly a solution that reduces human population by 90%, say to under a billion (mostly living on the high plateaus of Tibet, Wyoming, the Andes, etc), and possibly reduces population abruptly. But 1 billion is still plenty enough to keep human civilization going.
The Earth will be just fine, it will be a blip in its long history. Humanity may also very well survive. It’s modern human civilization anywhere near the current scale that will be lost. Collapse will be happen in stages with periods of relative calm, one lower level of complexity at a time, a dragged out affair. Everything possible to stem the tide will be tried, except for anything that challenges the powerful until it is too late. That’s how societies tend to collapse. From one simpler short term equilibrium to another. Some will do better than others.
Unless we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere plus probably large scale SRM given the change that is baked in given the slower equilibrium moves.
Who knows what a warmer climate could bring? A couple meters of sea level rise could wipe out a lot of critical infrastructure, indeed.
OTOH, the geologic & paleoclimatology record shows that the ecosystems of warmer Earth periods were WAY more productive than today’s. It could be the case that a warmer Earth could see a green Sahara & Arabian peninsula and longer growing seasons in higher latitudes. My point here is that nobody hasn’t even the slightest clue about what will happen.
You are most likely right about your population figures. The problem is will the 8 billion people who will die sacrifice themselves for the surviving one billion? Or will they go out fighting? Are you and yours willing to be part of the 8 billion? Will the fight for survival result in way less than 1 billion survivors? What will "survival" look like? I don't think survival in a post global climate change crash scenario will be like a picnic in the park with a happy, Disney ending for all that resembles anything resembling what we call "civilization".
Climate change is just a fancy name for weather.
I continue to be amazed at the ability of one side of the political spectrum to be utterly blinded to mainstream science (climate science) and the other side to also be utterly blinded to mainstream science (fundamental human sex differences). Both displaying the same post-modernist selective brain damage. Facts don’t care about your ideology or your feelings. I am a historical materialist, if facts conflict with my beliefs I rethink my beliefs. You should try it sometime.
“Climate change” is a form of religious belief in the sense that it can't be proven or disproven.
I’ll believe it's real when the people who say it is start to act like they really believe it.
Until then I'll continue to see it as a hoax designed to justify impoverishment and depopulation while enrishing the one percent.
Your observation on Canadian Tar Sands rising from 1.6 mbpd in 2010 to 3.5 mbpd in 2025 is crucial. Companies like Suncor Energy embody the exact dynamic you describe - each time the market thinks peak oil is near, technology innovation pushes it further out. What's remarkable about oil sands is the sheer scale of proven reserves (170+ billion barrels in Athabasca alone) combined with progresively lower extraction costs through SAGD improvements and mining efficiency. Suncor's integrated model - mining, in situ, upgrading, refining - means they've essentially built permanent energy infrastructure with 40+ year production visibility. Your point about being 'too smart for our own good' resonates here: oil sands technology solved the wrong problem brilliantly. We extended fossil fuel availability just as climate science showed we needed to stop, not continue. The irony is that Suncor's operational excellence accelerates the very climate crisis you describe.
Interesting analysis, thanks.
Peak OIl is a confusing subject to me, and guess I'm not alone.
As I have heard/read it seems that PO for 'conventional' crue oil was in Nov 2018, with shale oil and gas filling the gap just to keep our energy intensive world going.
Any thoughts?
Shale oil, with a little help from the Tar Sands, has bridged us to the Chinese driven energy transition. So the peak will be in oil consumption rather than oil production.
Thanks.
While I have not read the latest IEA (not DEA as I now have edited to be correct) report, but only heard it referenced and analyzed, I understand that they focus on the peak and fall of oil production.
I find all this to be a confusing issue.
You too a member of the "climate church"?
You too a member of the "climate crisis denialist cult"?